---
aliases:
  - Ron Blackburn
  - Ronald Blackburn
  - Dr. Ron Blackburn
  - Colonel Ron Blackburn
category: "Military"
tags:
  - Person
  - UFO
  - Lockheed
  - AirForce
  - ATP
  - 1980s
summary: "Retired Air Force lieutenant colonel at Lockheed in Burbank whom John B. Alexander named as co-founder of the 1985 Advanced Theoretical Physics group, and who appears in contemporaneous notes of its meetings."
relations:
  - type: employed_by
    with: "[[Lockheed Aircraft Company]]"
    start: 1984
    role: "Skunk Works, Burbank, according to John B. Alexander"
    fn: 1
  - type: member_of
    with: "[[Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group]]"
    start: 1985-05-21
    role: "listed under Lockheed in Jack Houck's note of May 21, 1985 and in Oke Shannon's attendee list"
    fn: 2
created: 2026-10-02
updated: 2026-10-02
---

Ron Blackburn is a retired [[United States Air Force|Air Force]] lieutenant colonel who, according to [[John B. Alexander]], was working at the [[Lockheed Aircraft Company]] [[Skunk Works]] in [[Burbank, California]] in 1984, when the two met after Alexander took over the Army's [[New Thrust]] project. Alexander wrote in 2011 that UFOs were "among areas of common interest between Blackburn and me." The [[Loose Threads Report|Loose Threads]] authors, summarizing Alexander's book, write that the two met in a secure facility at Lockheed to compare notes and create an invitation list for the [[Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group]].[^1]

### In the 1985 Notes

[[Jack Houck]]'s handwritten page of May 21, 1985, headed "Advanced Physics," places the name "Ron Blackburn" and a second name that may be read "[[Don Keuble]]" with the word "Lockheed" beside the circled objective "Does the evidence support an R+D project?" A page of [[Oke Shannon]]'s notes headed "Attendees," from a meeting the Loose Threads authors date to August 7, 1985, lists under the heading "Others," and the label Lockheed, Ron Blackburn, [[Milt Janzen]] and Don Keuble.[^2]

### In Vallee's Journals

[[Jacques Vallee]] recorded in February 1990, in a passage quoted by the Loose Threads authors, "Over lunch today the enigmatic Colonel Ron Blackburn decided to come clean with me in anticipation of our trip to [[New Mexico]]. . . He'd co-founded what I jokingly nicknamed the 'Secret Onion' group and co-organized a national panel on UFOs. In the first case, his co-founder was John Alexander; in the second case, it was none other than [[Kit Green]], who never told me about this."[^3] The Loose Threads authors write that Blackburn "indicated to Jacques Vallee that he was directly involved in the [[TRESTLE]]'s construction during his time with [[Air Force Weapons Laboratory|AFWL]]" (the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at [[Kirtland Air Force Base]]), quoting Vallee as recording him saying, "Those are the electromagnetic pulse testing facilities I built for the Air Force. Thousands of volts flow between those towers."[^3] They also write that a May 1990 entry in Vallee's journal says Blackburn had developed "magnetic UFO detectors" at Kirtland, and that a 1990 entry has Vallee taken by [[Ed Dames]], Blackburn and other Army personnel to a high mesa in New Mexico to watch for UFOs at a location said to have been determined by the remote viewing initiative [[Stargate Project|GRILL FLAME]].[^3] In August 1990 Vallee recorded Kit Green as saying that [[Howard Blum]]'s account of a secret group "simply alluded to John Alexander's and Ron Blackburn's proposed project," and that "it went nowhere."[^3]

### Footnotes

[^1]: Alexander, John B. *UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities,* 2011, as quoted in Elizondo, Daniel, and The Hermetic Penetrator, "The Loose Threads Report," Anomaly Archives, 2022, p. 20, https://anomalyarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/PDF-Loose-Threads.pdf.
[^2]: Houck and Shannon notes as reproduced in the Loose Threads Report, pp. 15 and 188.
[^3]: Vallee, Jacques. Journal entries of February, May and August 1990, as quoted in the Loose Threads Report, pp. 21 and 66-67 and the sections on EMP testing and on Ed Dames, which gives volume numbers only for the May and "1990" mesa entries (*Forbidden Science: Volume Four*); the February and August 1990 entries fall in the period of that volume. No Blackburn publication or Air Force Weapons Laboratory record was found.